Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University

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Lori S. Bennear, Associate Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy and Associate Professor in the Sanford School of Publc Policy and Associate Professor of Economics and Faculty Network Member of The Energy Initiative and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society

Bennear, LS; Olmstead, SM. "The impacts of the "right to know": Information disclosure and the violation of drinking water standards." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 56.2 (2008): 117-130. [doi] [abs]

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My research focuses on evaluating environmental policies and improving methods and techniques for conducting these evaluations. While the field of policy evaluation is a broad one, my specific niche is in bringing rigorous quantitative methods to evaluate environmental policy innovations along four dimensions. (1) Evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies and programs. This line of research uses statistical analysis to estimate the extent to which environmental policies such as information disclosure and management-based regulations actually improve corporate environmental performance, change household behavior, or improve individual environmental health indicators. (2) Evaluating strategic behavioral responses to non-traditional regulatory regimes. Environmental policies create incentives and in responding to these incentives, regulated entities sometimes behave strategically in ways that undermine program effectiveness. This line of research seeks to illuminate these strategic behavioral responses and quantify the magnitude of their impact. (3) Assessing the distributional impacts of these new regulatory regimes. My research in this area evaluates whether innovations in regulatory policy result in uneven distribution of environmental impacts on lower income or minority communities. (4) Evaluating the role of program evaluation in environmental policy. My research identifies the barriers to and facilitators of increased use of evaluation in environmental policy.

Bio/Profile
Environmental and natural resource economics, applied microeconomics, and empirical methods. Her research focuses on estimating the effect of different regulatory innovations on measures of facility-level environmental performance, such as pollution levels, chemical use, and technology choice. Recent work has focused on measuring the effectiveness of management-based regulations, which require each regulated entity to develop its own internal rules and initiates to achieve reductions in pollution, as well as the effectiveness of regulations that mandate public reporting of toxic emissions.